


follow you down

by Elendraug



Series: second go [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Canon Compliant, Hurt No Comfort, M/M, Miscommunication
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-02
Updated: 2019-02-02
Packaged: 2019-10-20 21:16:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17629844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elendraug/pseuds/Elendraug
Summary: when the darkness comessurrounds you in your sleepswallows up the sunI will chase you to the deep





	follow you down

**Author's Note:**

> thank you to everyone who supported me while writing this and the previous installments
> 
> heads up that there are mentions of canon character death and some description of looking closely at an eyeball, but nothing that includes injury or gore

* * *

_so just call me, you know I will be waiting_  
_for you as you walk towards that redemption sound_  
_you know I'll be the stillness when you're shaking_  
_and when you fall overboard, I'll[follow you down](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIY-N0QbiH4)_

  


“Why are these my eyes?”

Eridan looks up from filing his claws. “Because they’re attached to your face?”

“No, dipshit, that’s my _point_.” Sollux leans closer to the mirror, inspecting himself. “This is not my face.”

“It’s not your voice, either.” Eridan, seated on the edge of the ablution trap, drags a file delicately back and forth across his claw. “I’d just gotten used to having to hear your lisp in person, and now it’s gone.”

Sollux holds his eyelid open on his right eye, unaccustomed to the appearance. “The lisp I don’t miss.”

Eridan flicks his thumb over the file and a light dusting of powdered keratin floats to the bathroom floor. “You gonna freak out about this some more?”

“I’m taking my sweet time freaking out, thank you very much.” His breath fogs the mirror as he hovers close to it, watching his pupil dilate, transfixed by the new details of a body he thought he knew. There’s a depth to his iris that he’s only seen on other people, or even in macro photography on so many husktop wallpapers, of muscle as a scale replica of nebulae. “It’s so fucking weird.”

“I like the gold,” Eridan says, gesturing to show off the rings on his hands for emphasis. “It suits you.”

“You think so, huh?”

“Yeah. You manage to almost look attractive.”

Sollux snorts. “Oh, like I wasn’t already?”

“It’s like when they take cracked pottery and repair it with gold, and it’s a huge improvement over the way it was before.”

Sollux frowns. He lowers his hand and turns away from the mirror to regard Eridan. “I didn’t consider myself in need of repairs. I just wanted everyone to shut up.” 

“In your head, you mean.”

“Yeah.” He rubs at his eyes with both hands, and shakes his head to clear away exhaustion that he’s not even sure he should be experiencing. “The problem was always other people. As soon as that noise switched off for good, I was _fine_.”

There’s an implied _until now_ that he leaves unspoken, but Eridan’s not oblivious.

“Except for being blind.”

“You're the one who blinded me!”

“Well, maybe being merged with me is what fixed you.” 

There's rage built up within him, but the usual sparks are no longer flying at the edges of his consciousness; he can't seem to summon them. Instead he stands still, hands in fists at his sides, willing himself to feel the hiss and crackle of psionic energy, with phantom limb syndrome for a limb that never was anything more than a mental manifestation of his own effort.

All that aside, the possibility that Eridan’s _right_ about this can’t be ruled out.

Sollux presses the heels of his palms against his closed eyes until he sees static, a kaleidoscope of red, green, blue, an array of shifting hexagons in some space between his mind’s eye and his optic nerves. The phosphenes follow him when he moves his hands to allow light back in, and when his vision refocuses it’s on the precise, deliberate motions of Eridan’s wrist, as he twists open a small glass container and balances it on the lid of the toilet.

Eridan brushes polish onto his claws in slow strokes, coating them black as the abyss, swallowing the golden-yellow of his natural nails, dark like a sunless sea. 

Silence settles over the small space and it’s enough to just exist for a while, at rest at a stalemate, both of them unable to move any pieces in a constructive way until they reconfigure the terms under which they’re operating.

Sollux watches Eridan as he concentrates on his fingernails, and waits until the final finishing touch is applied. When Eridan looks up, Sollux reaches out with what’s left of his psychic abilities to topple the bottle onto the floor. The polish pours out, streaking down the ceramic of the toilet and onto the cheap vinyl he’s always hated, its sections curled at the edges after sweeps of accrued water damage.

A wave of irritation bubbles up from Eridan and Sollux can feel it, although he’s not sure if it’s extrasensory or simple standard perception.

“What the fuck?”

“That’s for Feferi.” The polish is an amorphous stain that recalls the non-shapes of the horrorterrors, when he dreamed on Derse, half the time. “And what a fucking understatement.”

“I don’t want to talk about that.” Eridan glares up at him, eyes narrowed behind his glasses. “Okay?”

“Yeah, I bet you fucking don’t.”

Eridan’s unable to move his hands while his nails are drying, and lowers his gaze to the floor, to imagine the emissary to the gods in the hidden depths of that darkness, and weighs the guilt of one more death after so many preceding it. 

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not the one you should be apologizing to,” Sollux snaps. “And I hardly count that half-assed shit that got said while we were together, since the other half of that ass was mine, and I had _zero_ culpability.”

Eridan lifts his arm to scratch an itch on his face with the back of his hand. “Why’d you have to say it like that?”

“Say what like what?” Sollux hooks his thumbs into his pockets, for want of somewhere to put them. “Spit it out.”

Eridan rests his wrists on his knees. “‘While we were together.’”

The disgust returns with a snarl he suppresses, swallowing air uncomfortably. With the nuance of his facial expressions no longer obscured by the flat, blank panels that had been his eyes for most of his life, there is nothing left to the imagination when his brow tenses, standing above Eridan as he stays stationary on the edge of the ablution trap. 

“Oh, we are never going to be together.”

“Then why are you here?”

Sollux fishes for a response and comes up short. He catches a view of himself in the mirror and startles at the anger that’s set into his countenance. 

He busies his hands by grabbing a long trail of toilet paper, wadding it up, and flinging it at the drying puddle of black that’s caked to the floor. “Take those fucking glasses off already, I’m sick of having to look at them.”

Eridan watches his erratic movements, fueled with understandable resentment, and stares at the nail polish as it soaks up into the fibers of the paper. The dual-tinting of the room dissipates the longer he watches, until his vision is completely clear.

“What the shit?”

“What?”

Sollux points at him. “How the fuck did you do that?”

Eridan takes the frames off his face and flips them, as if inspecting the plastic would yield any answers. “I don’t know.”

Sollux takes a step forward but won’t complete the motion to grab for the glasses, the effort ended like a malfunctioning task he had to intercept to keep his thoughts running smoothly. It’s difficult enough with so much information competing for his attention, and so much of _that_ at odds with itself. 

“I _do_ know how it is that you feel about me,” Eridan says, folding the glasses and setting them on the edge of the tub, aside the nail file. He checks to ensure he hasn’t disturbed the drying of the polish, which safeguards him from having to look anywhere else. “Lest you somehow fuckin’ forget that I was part of your mutated brain, too, and I got a glimpse of what was in there.”

“At least I’m not a sociopath.” Sollux doesn’t even shout, and the measured tone is worse. “At least I’m not a murderer.”

“Oh, like you’ve never fuckin’ killed your girlfriend.” Eridan braces himself on the side of the tub to keep his hands still. “As if I don’t have the same fuckin’ memories of your freak brain vaporizing Aradia on her lawnring.”

“You know _goddamn well_ that wasn’t me, so shut the fuck up!”

“It still hurts just as bad, doesn’t it?” Eridan gives him a dangerous look. “You weren’t in your right mind, right? You didn’t mean to. Things just got out of control, and it was too late once you realized what you were doing.”

There’s a flickering at the perimeter of Sollux’s skull like a lighter that just won’t catch flame. He points at him again, accusatory, justified in it. “That’s completely fucking unfair and you absolutely fucking know it, you sack of shit.”

Sollux stomps out of the bathroom with deliberately heavy footfalls, desperate to put space between them, trapped in his own hive. 

“There’s shit we all wish we could forget, Sollux!” Eridan calls after him, gripping the tub wall hard until his violet blood retreats from his fingertips where they’re pressed against the cheap fiberglass construction, all that the communal hive stem was willing to shell out for. “And now I can’t even forget _your_ shit, on top of mine!”

The silence is as deafening as the roar of once-royal blood rushing through his ears, pounding with his pulse and the echoes of headaches that are not his own. The floor is still soiled with polish-sodden paper and memories of a mess that took sweeps to accumulate. His nails are immaculate, and the world would be better if he could convince his conscience to feel the same way.

But he can’t, and won’t.

After several isolated minutes pass within the cramped ablution block of Sollux’s timeworn hive, Eridan stands up and steps through over the threshold, avoiding the now crusty spill of whatever resin-equivalents comprise the polish as he makes his exit.

Sollux is not immediately present, but Eridan finds him soon enough, ensconced in his respiteblock like he’s six sweeps and hiding from the multitude of atrocities rampaging across the planet instead of avoiding a conversation that admittedly took a turn for the worst.

Eridan rests a hand lightly on the doorway, where the door’s been left open, careful not to touch his fingernails too close to any surface. “Hey.”

Sollux sits cross-legged in his computer chair, with one knee pulled up to his chest. There’s no sense in using the keyboard through which he’d spent so long synthesizing his existence; it’s not connected to anything anymore and has nothing but fragments of his own memories of the file structure. “Hey.”

“That was fuckin’... rotten of me to say.”

“Yeah, it was.”

“I shouldn’t’ve said that about Aradia, not after all that’s happened. Not after what she did.”

There’s a frog in his throat and he drags his knuckles over his downcast eyes. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

“Okay.”

Sollux stares at his dim reflection in the empty monitor, where he hasn’t bothered to switch it on, despite the gentle glow of the power button that invites him to reach out and do so. He’s not the guy he used to be; he’s not the same body who sat at this desk.

“I’m sorry, Sollux,” Eridan says, standing still at the door.

“Sorry’s not enough.”

Eridan takes a deep breath and lets it back out, in an attempt to calm himself. “What do you want me to do?”

“Nothing.” Sollux leans his chin on his hand, elbow braced against his knee. “You can’t make this better.”

“I’ve been you, so I know how you feel about me,” Eridan repeats, voice wavering. “Every piece of it. We’ve gotta have this conversation sooner or later.”

Sollux shifts his posture, hides his face in the crook of his elbow, and speaks against his arm. “Not this second, we don’t.”

The rush of dejection that emanates from Eridan is practically palpable, and Sollux insists to himself that he’s glad about it.

“What happened to your glasses?” he asks, well aware he was the one to demand their removal. “Don’t you need them to see?”

“No,” Eridan admits. He shifts his weight and leans heavily against the doorframe, his horn knocking into its scraped, flaking paint. “They’ve always been plano lenses. Don’t do fuckin’ anything besides look good.”

Sollux makes a noncommittal noise. “We’re learning a lot about ourselves tonight, aren’t we?”

Eridan takes the scene in: the slouched curvature of Sollux’s spine through his t-shirt, the buzzed hair at the nape of his neck that builds limited volume up towards his horns as he tips them towards his forearm, the tension set into his slight shoulders.

“Yeah,” he says, “I guess we are.”

Stubborn, Sollux mumbles towards his knee, refusing to sit up. “Why don’t you learn to go away, then?”

“There’s nowhere for me to go in this apartment.” Eridan’s cheek pushes into the doorframe, tipping his horn back upright. It doesn’t quite hurt. “You only have one block.”

“Go be somewhere besides here.”

Eridan says nothing, and hesitates with one foot ready to step towards him, but decides against it and moves backward instead.

Sollux spares a glance at him over his arm, with his peripheral vision, the gold of his eye barely visible above the grey of his skin.

“This is just what I do,” Eridan says, from the hall, and Sollux isn’t even sure to whom it’s directed. “Prince of Hope just fuckin’ hatched to bum the fuck out of everybody around him.”

Sollux closes his eyes and can’t stop himself from smiling into the crook of his arm. “I can do that without any powers.”

A few seconds go by without any answer, and Sollux hears the couch creak as Eridan sits down back in the living room.

The tension travels from his shoulders and manifests in the clench of his teeth. He keeps his eyes shut tightly, breathing the muggy air he’s been exhaling into his arm, and doesn’t say anything else, either.


End file.
